Doylestown, PA | Siren Records Will No Longer Carry Kanye West LPs, CDS: Doylestown record store announces the news following antisemitic remarks by the rapper and recording artist. The backlash over antisemitic remarks by rapper and recording artist Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has reached downtown Doylestown. Siren Records announced in a Facebook posting on Friday that it would no longer be carrying Kanye West’s LPs or CDs. Ye is regarded as one of the greatest musicians of his generation. “We will not support his abhorrent, unyielding and unapologetic vitriol against the Jewish community. Thank you for your understanding and for the many years of support,” wrote the record store. The decision by Siren is the latest in the fallout from Ye’s recent comments on Twitter and in interviews, which, according to a Instagram post by Ye, cost him 2 billion dollars in one day in lost product endorsements and other income.
DE | 7 Record Stores in Delaware to Discover New Music: In a modern world where streaming has taken over the music scene, these record stores provide a taste of the golden age of listening. Most music lovers in 2022 choose to listen to their favorite songs with a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music. However, there’s something to be said for listening to your favorite albums on vinyl. In an era obsessed with nostalgia, it’s safe to say vinyl records aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Spotify playlists are great, but there’s something special about browsing bins full of records and discovering new music through conversations with staff at the store. For music enthusiasts who love listening to records, Delaware has a great selection of record stores across the state. These shops around Delaware are keeping tradition alive by providing everything from the classics to pop and new metal.
Greenville, NC | New record store looks to bring the music to eastern North Carolina: A new business now open in Greenville hopes to be music to customers’ ears. A new vinyl store, Alleycat Records, has just recently opened. Owner David Brown is ready to showcase all types of music to the Greenville community. With so many options on display along with merchandise of all kinds, Brown said guests can basically find anything they want. Along with the records/CDs, Alleycat Records also offers T-shirts for bands such as The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, KISS, Led Zeppelin and others. They also sell coffee mugs, posters and action figures. In the interview, Brown also goes into detail about what inspired the team to open the business, what kind of music they have for customers and much more.
Tonypandy, UK | Pick of the pops in The Tonypandy Record Shop: Can you picture it, the first LP you ever bought? You were probably in your early teens, still keen on Top Of The Pops, tuning in to ‘wonderful’ Radio 1 on 247, or if you’d been clued in by friends at school about stuff that was cool and trendy, listening to a pirate station like Radio Caroline in your bedroom at night. I expect you already had a collection of singles, of 45rpm discs, acquired when you first began to get pocket-money – chart hits that you played on the family’s record player. Maybe your parents – if they were a lot more ‘hip’ and sophisticated than my Mam and Dad – had invested in a stereo system. And now… you were ready to graduate to your first proper grown-up choice: an album, a 12-inch long playing record pressed onto black vinyl, all packaged up in a gate-fold cover, a sleeve, adorned with the band’s name and some snazzy artwork, and just waiting to delight and surprise you – once you’d switched speeds to 33 revolutions per minute – with two whole sides of tracks: 8, 10, 12 of them!
New York, NY | Bleecker Bob’s, the Legendary Record Shop: In this excerpt from the new book New York Groove: An Inside Look at the Stars, Shows, and Songs That Make NYC Rock, we look back at Bleecker Bob’s, the iconic Greenwich Village record shop. Fellow record collectors Al Trommers and Robert Plotnik opened Village Oldies in 1967 at 149 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was at the record shop that Trommers, known as Broadway Al, gave Plotnik the nickname Bleecker Bob. The partners moved to MacDougal Street in the 1970s. By 1981, Trommers left the business and Plotnik moved to the former Night Owl Café site at 118 West Third Street, where the shop was renamed Bleecker Bob’s Records. The shop, and Bob’s tough-guy persona, were immortalized in 1993 on television’s Seinfeld in the episode “The Old Man.” Plotnik recognized new trends in music and it was the source of hard-to-find punk rock releases in the genre’s early days. Thousands of albums and singles were stacked in countertop compartments and posters and memorabilia covered the walls. David Bowie, Keith Richards, the Ramones, Frank Zappa, Lou Reed, and Cyndi Lauper often perused the racks of vinyl. Patti Smith met guitarist Lenny Kaye there when he worked at the shop. “Bob’s was more than a record store,” Kaye told the New York Times. “It was an important gathering place to introduce and hear the new and progressive as well as honoring the past, how music lives on to influence and discover its new forms.”
Holy Grail! What is a ‘Grail’ and what does it mean to a music collector? Let’s take a look at what qualifies as your most prized possession… musically speaking, of course. Before we dive head in and explore this phenomenon that ever-so-lovely plagues the life of a music aficionado whose passion is the collecting and curating of physical music media, let’s take a look at the term and where it actually originates from. The term or name, “Holy Grail” is, in actuality, medieval terminology (from about the 13th century), used to describe either the goblet [cup] or dish that Jesus Christ used in the company of his disciples during the Last Supper. It is also of which, by myth and tradition, the same “cup” that Joseph of Arimathea (who was awarded the burial of Christ) was given Christ’s blood in, at the Cross. The latter of course (with the exception of Joseph of Arimathea) having no Biblical, scriptural or canonical basis of truth. It is simply understood as legend created by medieval knights more than likely during the Crusades, who wreaked havoc throughout the Holy Land looking for religious artifacts — ‘this’ being the pinnacle and most elusive of them all… the Holy Grail.
Lincoln, NE | Albums still matter — some thoughts on Taylor Swift’s “Midnights.” Albums, we’re told, no longer matter. We’re back in a singles era where songs are cherry picked from streaming services and slapped into playlists concocted by algorithms, influencers and exploratory listeners themselves. If nothing else, Taylor Swift’s “Midnight” proves that notion is, at best, overstated and, in the case of top-shelf artists, just flat wrong. To wit, in its first four days after its release at midnight Oct. 21, Swift’s 10th album earned more than 1.3 equivalent album units in the U.S., according to Billboard, making it the biggest selling album in a single week since Adele moved 3.4 million copies of “25” back in 2015. Impressively, traditional album sales – digital downloads, on CD, vinyl and cassettes, made up more than 1 million of those units, with a half-million of those on vinyl, the most ever on vinyl since 1991. As for streaming, “Midnights” became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day on Oct. 21, and racked up, according to Billboard, 357 million on-demand official streams on both audio and video in its first four days of release.
